The Denver Broncos first four games of the season could end up in some variation of home games against the New Orleans Saints and Tampa Bay Buccaneers and road games against the Atlanta Falcons and Carolina Panthers. Essentially, the first month will be against their non-conference opponents.
Vic Tafur, who covers the Las Vegas Raiders, noted that this is likely to be the case when the NFL schedule is released on Thursday.
Anticipate NFL schedule being released tomorrow with possibly disposable non-conference games the first 4 weeks. So #Raiders, in some order, would host Bucs and Saints and travel to face Panthers and Falcons in first month.
— Vic Tafur (@VicTafur) May 6, 2020
The reasoning behind this is over the possibility of the NFL cancelling a portion of their season as the nation continues to recover and fight the COVID-19 pandemic. If the shutdown persists long enough to begin affecting games, the cancelling of non-conference games has the least affect over divisional and conference seeding.
This contingency will give the NFL a little flexibility as the world continues their COVID-19 containment efforts. I actually like it. Even if the season starts on time, the Broncos can get their non-conference games out of the way and any kinks that need to get fleshed out will get fleshed out by the time Week 5 rolls around.
What do you think of this?